What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?

It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring.

It is easy to survey basic topics with only one tool (state active or not). But I think with my experience that's better to split the network side and the datacenter side. By exemple, the monitoring of the configurations have sense only for network devices, with real-time alerting. For this purpose, we use Solarwinds NCM. For the network devices, the monitoring of the topology is also important.

For routers devices, a netflow collector is very useful to know the kind of the trafic. And also a good syslog collector (feature included in NCM)

It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. 

You can check LogicMonitor, InfraonIMS (EverestIMS Technologies), Thousand Eyes etc.

We just did an assessment for our 47 datacenters around North America. The top two enterprise-level network monitoring solutions were ExtraHop first, Riverbed SteelCenter second. Their negotiated cost is about the same but ExtraHop gives more features, has an excellent out of the box interface, and was the staff favorite after a proof of concept.

PRTG network monitor is one of the best tool i have ever used for the monitoring. It have auto discovery option. it avoid the configuring the device in PRTG. It automatically discover the device and ip will get configured . Dashboard presentation in PRTG is very nice. Alarm , warnings ,logs and device running status etc can be displayed in there. Map view in the PRTG is very good feature which other similar product lacks. Network monitoring tool for SNMP is with in PRTG

Hi Rony,

Oh my goodness! That's a loaded question. 

Unfortunately, there is no "Best" solution. Each monitoring software has its ups and downs. 

I prefer those that are easy to configure and centralizes information under one umbrella. The current security suites call themselves orchestration tools or Security Information and Event Management suites. SIEMs poll or push information under one environment, parse the data and formulate unintelligible bytes into readable and digestible information that can be graphed, queried, and managed in addition to AI+ML+analytics applications. 

Anything that has the terms orchestration or SIEM is a perfect tool. Note that these tools don't come cheap and require some training to operate smoothly. There are several free tools for gathering information and graphing, such as MRTG, to name one, but I have yet to find a free or open-source SIEM that includes all the bells and whistles (ELK comes closest). 

Again, which tool is the best is completely subjective and requires personal experience. In most cases, companies will offer a free trial. Paid for Companies like Splunk, Cynet, Alienware, to name a few, can be contacted and demo's requested. Here is a list of free apps: Query Google for a list of free apps and tests each one for your environment.  Honestly, paying for tools is better because of the support element offered compared with community-style support. Today's security suites offer meaningful dailies/operational insights which can prevent future incidents. Having everything under one logical location is the way to go. Finding a suite that offers administration roles and permissions for access greatly increases security within your organization too. 

Here is some Enterprise-class that offer demos:

OPSView, Spectrum, Splunk, 
Site 24x7, Zenoss Cloud, Atera, ManageEngine Opmanager [OPM]
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, Datadog Network Performance Monitoring
Paessler PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios Core, Zabbix, WhatsUp Gold (Good for Windows), Icinga, Spiceworks Connectivity Dashboard, Ntop, Observium.

For networking, we use Riverbed NPM. For APM we just finished testing Instana, and I am very impressed with the results. It monitors on-premise, cloud, multicloud and hybrid. It is fully AI and configures almost everything automatically.

In my opinion Infosim, StableNet Enterprise is the best as it is a third-generation highly automated network management system. It enables IT departments to unify the management requirements of their IT infrastructures in a way that enables the ‘true-visibility’ of the environment.

Being able to correlate Performance, Fault, and Configuration within a single unified application rapidly improves the Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR) and increases the service uptime thus maintaining high levels of sustained service availability to your customers, and providing a great end-user experience.

StableNet® Enterprise is a highly flexible management system with a wealth of additional functional modules that fully complement industry best practices, i.e. ITILv3, SOX, PCI, NSA, etc. StableNet® Enterprise can be deployed on a multi-tenanted or dedicated platform and can be operated in a highly dynamic flex-compute environment.

I have worked from 1973 with all kind of systems in large enterprises across the world. And have experience with all kind of software in monitoring from infra to end to end, it depends on the functionality you require. For example do you need to monitor all switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers etc. And only the devices or traffic and response times as well. Do you need data from MIBS or only IP, UDP or other protocols. Do you need easy to install or can it be a little bit complicated. I prefer IBM Netcool it does not only equipment but almost everything including voice over IP. but t is not an easy install. If you like a easy install I recommend SolarWinds Network or BMC. Also you have a lot of freeware tools however I don't recommend this for enterprise environments.

Regards Tjeerd

rufusai.com

In my experience, I worked with many monitoring software, but the one that gave me the most functionalities of a large-scale company is Zenoss, due to its ability to monitor completely hybrid and agnostic environments, its scalability, and the concept of use of Zenpacks that they are completely programmable by the user.

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring software tool for diverse IT components, including networks, servers, virtual machines (VMs) and cloud services. Zabbix provides monitoring metrics, among others network utilization, CPU load and disk space consumption. Zabbix monitoring configuration can be done using XML based templates which contain elements to monitor. The software monitors operations on Linux, Hewlett Packard Unix (HP-UX), Mac OS X, Solaris and other operating systems (OSes); however, Windows monitoring is only possible through agents. Zabbix can use MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle or IBM DB2 to store data. Its backend is written in C and the web frontend is written in PHP. Zabbix offers several monitoring options:

Simple checks can verify the availability and responsiveness of standard services such as SMTP or HTTP without installing any software on the monitored host.

A Zabbix agent can also be installed on UNIX and Windows hosts to monitor statistics such as CPU load, network utilization, disk space, etc.

As an alternative to installing an agent on hosts, Zabbix includes support for monitoring via SNMP, TCP and ICMP checks, as well as over IPMI, JMX, SSH, Telnet and using custom parameters. Zabbix supports a variety of near-real-time notification mechanisms, including XMPP.

Released under the terms of GNU General Public License version 2, Zabbix is free software.

I would say that you need to identify your greatest need or business unit that requires the best support first.

With that information you start to identify what information you require - Fault, Configuration, Accounting/Assurance, Performance, Security.

Also, what type of solution; polling based, event based, passive (taps/packet brokers/Netflow - wire data).

Do you require basic up/down or advanced analytics with ML/AI.

All of that will determine your next steps and which solution(s) you might need to implement.

We are using for our FaultManagement for our networkdevices: Broadcom DX Spectrum (large enterprise)

I have a clear bias because I work for Panopta.

We aren't a fit for everyone, but I can confirm that Panopta is a lot less work to stand up and maintain. It's also a lot easier to use and onboard new staff. 

I'm happy to answer any questions that are specific to what you need/want.

From my point of view, SolarWind is the best tool.

We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer are strongly in demand and are globally market-leading.

We have developed APM & Log mgmt. product SnappyFlow (https://www.snappyflow.io/#/). 

SnappyFlow is an APM & Log Monitoring application that brings together metrics, logs, tracing & synthetic monitoring in an elegant workflow and unified view. 

We work with SaaS companies having Cloud-native applications that are microservices-based, dispersed across VMs, Kubernetes & Cloud Services and straddle hybrid Clouds. SnappyFlow is best suited to optimize your cloud-native apps, maximize the performance and availability of your cloud infrastructure. 

SnappyFlow is currently listed in AWS and vCenter marketplace and cost-effective, scalable and flexible solution compared to its peers, including Cloudwatch. We're offering extended free trials till the time you're comfortable with the product. Please give it a thought. 

Thanks!

I am the CTO of the Statseeker network monitoring tool. I worked for over 11 years as a Director of Engineering at Cisco. We support some of the largest enterprises globally with a small server footprint, one-minute granularity and we never average the historical data. We can augment SolarWinds with a very scalable, yet low cost (non-Windows) SNMP polling, Ping, REST API solution. 

Why not? What are this advantages?